"All right," said Raven, and realized he must not speak again.
Thereafter the fight with Anne went on within the arena of his mind. He poured himself forth to her. For the first time in his life, he admitted her to his inner beliefs and sympathies. He would not, he told her, devote her money to the debasing of the world. Wherever she was, she had not learned a page more than she had known when she wrote that letter to him about the things that help the world and the things that hinder. He didn't believe, he told her, she really wanted to learn. She wanted only to be obeyed, to put her money where she had ordered it to go merely because she had ordered it.
"You can't have it, Anne," he repeated, whenever his mind halted in argument, and she kept pressing him back, back into his old hopeless subserviency. "I'll tell you where it's going. It's going to France. There won't be any palace, Anne. It's going into the land. It's going to help little French boys and French girls to grow up with time enough and strength enough to put their beautiful intelligence into saving the earth. It's going to be that sort of a bulwark between them and the enemies of the earth. And that's the only road to peace. Don't you see it is, Anne? Don't you see it? You won't get peace by talking about it. You wasted your money when you did it, all through war-time. You harmed and hindered. Don't you know you did? If you don't, what's the use of dying? Don't they know any more there than we do here? Anyway, I know more than you did when you made your will, and that's what I'm going to do. Train up beautiful intelligences, Anne, the ones that are likeliest to work it all out practically: how to live, that's what they're going to work out, how to live, how to help the world to live. Don't you see, Anne? For God's sake, don't you see?"
She didn't see, or, if she did, she was too angry to give him the comfort of knowing she did. But suddenly, in the midst of her anger, there was a break, a stillness, though it had been still before. Perhaps it was most like a stillness of mind, and he felt himself as suddenly awake to a certainty that Anne had done with him. Once before she had seemed to leave him, but this time it was for good. She had gone, wherever the road was open to her. He had armed his will and sent it out to fight her will. She was routed, and she would never challenge him again. Perhaps, in her scorn, she had repudiated him. Perhaps the world, if it were called on to pronounce judgment, would repudiate him for betraying a dead woman's trust. Well, let it. The impeccability of his own soul wasn't so very valuable, after all, weighed against what he saw as the indisputable values of mortal life. He lay back on his bed, exhausted by the fight, foolishly exhausted because, he told himself, there hadn't been any real Anne. Only her mind, as he had known it, and his own mind had been grappling, like two sides of an argument. But while he tried to dull himself with this denial of the possibilities beyond our sense, he knew underneath that there had been Anne. And she had gone. She would not come again.
Then he must have slept, for there was a gulf of forgetfulness, and when his eyes came open, it was on Tenney standing there in the doorway. Raven felt squalid after the night in his clothes, and Tenney looked to him in much the same case. Also Tenney was shrunken, even since he had come to the hut the day before, and then he had seemed not three-quarters of his height. He asked now, not as if he cared, but as if he wondered idly:
"D' I leave my ammunition up here?"
He had the gun in his hand.
"Let the gun alone," said Raven. He got up and took it away from him, and Tenney dumbly suffered it. "We'll go down now and have some breakfast, and Jerry'll do your chores."
"I can do my own chores," said Tenney. "I can go into the barn, I guess."
By this Raven understood that he did not mean to go into the house. Perhaps he was afraid of it. Men are afraid of houses that have grown sinister because of knowing too much.